A team of highly determined high school students has detected pulsar with widest orbit ever.
The team discovered a never-before-seen pulsar by painstakingly analyzing data from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT). Further observations by astronomers using the GBT revealed that this pulsar has the widest orbit of any around a neutron star and is part of only a handful of double neutron star systems.
Lead author Joe Swiggum from West Virginia University said that pulsars are some of the most extreme objects in the universe and the students' discovery shows one of these objects in a really unique set of circumstances.
About 10 percent of known pulsars are in binary systems; the vast majority of these are found orbiting ancient white dwarf companion stars. Only a rare few orbit other neutron stars or main sequence stars like our Sun. The reason for this paucity of double neutron star systems, astronomers believe, is the process by which pulsars and all neutron stars form.
This pulsar, which received the official designation PSR J1930-1852, was discovered in 2012 by Cecilia McGough, who was a student at Strasburg High School in Virginia at the time, and De'Shang Ray, who was a student at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Baltimore, Maryland.
Astronomers determined that this new pulsar is part of a binary system, based on the differences in its spin frequency (revolutions per second) between the original detection and follow-up observations.
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Swiggum noted that its orbit is more than twice as large as that of any previously known double neutron star system, adding that the pulsar's parameters give them valuable clues about how a system like this could have formed. Discoveries of outlier systems like J1930-1852 give them a clearer picture of the full range of possibilities in binary evolution.
The study appears in Astrophysical Journal.